Steven Kent And Satoru Iwata

I can’t help but envy Steven Kent, the games journalist who wrote ‘The First Quarter’, a brilliant book on games history. He regularly publishes insightful articles on the videogames market and now he’s touring Japan, researching his next book.

Iwata carefully restates Nintendo’s stance on technology: the company wants its next console to be as powerful as the competition’s, but it’s not building new technologies like Sony. Instead, Nintendo seeks out up and coming developments and partners with companies like IBM to build their hardware.

Iwata is quick to add two things: Nintendo wants its hardware easy to develop for, and next time, Nintendo is sure to add something truly new to its console. Something that offers a fun and functional gameplay enhancement that none of its competitors can offer. This is the type of PR I’ve come to love from Nintendo — the type that makes me want to speculate with a smile on my face.

Really, this interview is so far ahead of the mistranslated Iwata quotes published by the major websites from time to time, it almost makes me cry. Thank you mister Kent!

I disagree on just one thing, though. When asked what went wrong with GameCube, Iwata says: “I think that its biggest shortcoming was that we were late in launching it.” Well, no. If you ask me, the keyword is ‘positioning’. More on that some other time.